Line Today bets on hub role

Corporate May 23, 2018 01:00

By ASINA PORNWASIN
THE NATION

2,091 Viewed

LINE Thailand has set out its ambitions for the Line Today platform as a hub for publishers to post news and other content from their own platforms and reach a projected 42 million users in the future.

Kawin Tangudtaisak, content business director of Line Thailand, said that Line Today focuses on the curation and creation of reliable content, which is a key consideration for advertisers in determining where to allocation their spending.

“We see a big gap in the provision of news content for teenagers and other young people,” said Kawin. “Therefore, Line Today is debuting the provision of news content in a way that fits with teenagers’ behaviour in content consumption.

“The biggest group of users of Line Today are those aged between 25 and 34.”Line Today has 32 million users and the company aims to increase this number to 42 million users at an unspecified time in the future.

The goal of Line Today this year is to increase the numbers of users and engagement (page-views per users) in order to eventually to increase advertising revenue.

“This year the focus is to increase numbers of users and page views, and then ad revenue. Line Today has arrived to help media industry to transform the content business from traditional media platforms to online media platform in a smooth manner,” said Kawin.

He said the overall ad spending in Thailand has not increased, and that it has shifted from print media (decreasing 20 per cent each year) to other platforms. Now, online advertising has enjoyed 30 per cent growth, and this segment accounts for only 10 per cent of total advertising spending in the media industry in Thailand. Line Today is designed to increase online ad spending options for publishers.

Line Today has a click-to-rate (CTR) figure at around 8 to 10 per cent; in contrast, online ads’ CTR is only 1 per cent.

Range of ad formats

Charath Petthongchai, head of Line Today, said that the service’s advertising formats include native, banner, and advertorial forms.

Line Today generates sharing revenue (from advertising) and traffic back to the original platform and publishers can also generate revenue by themselves as well.

Line Today is service that aims to replicate the success of Line News in Japan. The Line Today service is now available in three countries and territories, with the others being Taiwan and Indonesia.

“The main content now is news and we will increase the number of videos available, which is different from Line TV’s video content since video on Line Today is shot-form video content of between 5 and 10 minutes,” said Charath.

Line Today is now focusing on increasing user engagement, with 38 views per user per months or a reading of once a day. It now aims to get readings of twice a day.

Line Today has 120 content partners across 10 main content categories.

The main content of Line TV is news and lifestyle material. This comprises content under creation/co-creation and curation, with a rate of 5 per cent and 95 per cent, respectively.

There are around 600 to 700 items of content available within each day n Line Today.